Music

The opera’s choreographer and co-director, Camille A. Brown, talks about the legacy of the African diaspora and influence of “School Daze” in her dances.Camille A. Brown had a lot of catching up to do. She wasn’t part of the original creative team behind Terence Blanchard’s opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” when it was presented in 2019 in St. Louis. But at the Metropolitan Opera, where the production runs through Saturday — the first time a work by a Black composer has been presented there in its 138-year history — her touch is palpable.Clearly, she caught up. And she’s making history, too: Brown, who shares directorial duties with James Robinson, is the first Black artist to direct a Met production. She is also the opera’s choreographer, and as such has brought social dance — step, the percussive form popular at historically Black colleges and universities (H.B.C.U.) — to the Met stage.Opening Act III is a step number that stops the show in its tracks. On opening night, the dancers held their final pose, one foot crossed over the other as sweat poured down their faces. Frozen in a line facing the audience, they tried to control their breathing as the audience clapped and roared. And clapped and roared some more. It lasted for more than a minute, and it was spectacular.When was the last time a dance stopped an opera in its tracks? Brown, a Tony-nominated dance-maker who choreographed “Porgy and Bess” under Robinson’s direction at the Met, has never experienced anything like it.Brown at opening night last month.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“I was just thrilled,” she said. “I was thrilled for the moment. I was thrilled for social dance. I was thrilled for the dancers onstage that had been working for six weeks to put this show together.”She added: “I feel like the audience — to me — was clapping for several reasons. It was about the dance, but it was about what it meant to see that on the stage. And legacy.”Step and its use of the body as a percussive instrument speaks to the Black experience: When their drums were taken away, enslaved people created rhythm with their bodies. In the opera, step enters the picture when the protagonist, Charles (Will Liverman), is a college student and pledges at the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. He also continues to grapple with the experience of having been molested by his older cousin when he was a young boy, seen in flashbacks. (The opera is based on the 2014 memoir by The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow.)While Act I contains no actual dance, the characters roam the stage with vibrant texture — their everyday, pedestrian movement, both rich and real, is recognizably Brown. Along with the step number, Brown choreographed another major dance, which opens Act II and shows Charles surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Full of tension and longing, it reveals the character’s state of mind: confused and anguished, yet also intrigued.The baritone Will Liverman surrounded opens surrounded by dancers slipping in and out of erotic moments. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBrown is adept at baring emotion through the body. The dancers, their arms reaching imploringly, move vividly and broadly as if washing the stage with brushstrokes. Later, they transform into trees as Charles sings: “We draw our strength from underneath. We bend, we don’t break. We sway!”As he sings, Charles rounds his body forward in a powerful contraction and opens his arms as he stands straight and ultimately rises above his suffering.In “Fire,” which will be broadcast theatrically on Oct. 23 as part of the Met Live in HD series, Brown displays her choreographic range. “There was the more contemporary dance side, and then there’s the more rhythmical side,” she said. “You don’t get to feel those extremes in one place very often.”And her directorial prowess is only growing. Up next? She directs the Broadway revivalof Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Recently Brown spoke about her work on “Fire” and honoring her ancestors. What follows are edited excerpts from that conversation.Brown with her co-director, James Robinson, during a rehearsal in August.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesHow did you, as a choreographer and director, envision the opera?When I’m working on a show, and as a director of my company, I always try to find, what is my entry point to the story? I thought about some of my dear friends that had very similar stories, so I entered it in that way.When I first heard about the opera and I found out that there was a fraternity section, I was so excited. There’s an opportunity to do a step dance inside of an opera?Why is it so important to put social dance on the Met stage?We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens and along with that comes Black culture spoken through or danced through the Black lens. And knowing that, at one point in the Met’s history, Black people weren’t allowed to perform on that stage.So you go from that to now: We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage. That is so powerful. You see the fraternity-sorority, you see the H.B.C.U., but you also see the Juba dance [the African-American percussive form that uses the feet and the hands]. And you see the African diaspora onstage.“We are doing something that is so rooted in African tradition on the Met stage,” Brown said of the fraternity scenes.Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesHow did you put the number together?I was inspired by two movies: “Drumline” and “School Daze.” I’ve always loved “School Daze,” and when this opportunity came about to create the fraternity scene, I thought this needs to be a moment. Yes, Charles is pledging, and he’s going through that experience, but it’s also important, especially being on the Met stage, to show as much as we can of what that whole entire experience is. I want to talk about the dream ballet. Is it OK if I call it that?[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, that’s totally fine.What were you thinking?In any show that I’ve done, there’s always one piece that is really, really hard for me. And that was what you call the dream ballet. The first two weeks of working on it, I was freaking out a little bit because I wasn’t liking what I was doing.What happened?I was talking to my co-director, James Robinson, about the movie “Moonlight” and about how Charles was wrestling with what we are calling phantoms in his dreams — and how they haunted him, but they also enticed him. And so I gave myself a break and eased back on criticizing myself and said, You know what? Just play. Give yourself the space to figure it out.How did “Moonlight” influence you?Just by the beautiful imagery. Just wanting to talk about relationships and the sensitivity, and how does it feel to touch someone for the first time? Feeling like it’s wrong, but wanting to trust that it’s OK.“We talk about Terence being the first Black composer on the Met stage. And so along with that comes the Black lens.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow involved were you in the first act?It may be easy for someone to come in and go, Oh, well, she just did the choreography. But that really wasn’t the case. James and I were both thinking about the molestation scene and how the chorus interacts.Most of the chorus members were also in “Porgy,” so I’d already worked with them. We were talking about how they move because even though they’re technically not dancing, they still are moving. And it’s the 1970s. We looked at some videos and talked: What were the small ways that people walked to indicate the time period?Was Katherine Dunham in your mind throughout this experience?Oh! Why do you ask?Because of your use of social dance and the fact that she choreographed at the Met. And because so much of this opera, at its root, is about the body as a force. It’s urgent. It made me think of your lineage.I always carry her and Pearl Primus and Dianne McIntyre and Marlies Yearby in the space with me. This is a historical moment, but this is also about people who have paved the way for you. It is coming from a deep place — it is coming from the social dance. How can I contribute to that legacy of Black choreographers delving into the African diasporic space? It’s about contributing to the space. When we do what we know, and we show how honest we are with our decisions, that is honoring our ancestors. More

The Houston rapper Don Toliver opens at No. 2, while the music industry turns its attention to the numbers for Adele’s comeback single.Drake returns to No. 1 on this week’s Billboard album chart, while the Houston rapper Don Toliver opens at No. 2 and the music industry keeps a close eye on the numbers for a song that will impact next week’s chart: Adele’s comeback single.Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy,” which arrived at No. 1 last month with blockbuster streaming numbers after nearly a year of teases and false starts, notched its fourth week at the top. In its sixth week out, “Certified” had the equivalent of 94,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Virtually all of that number is attributed to streaming, with nearly 126 million clicks online.After six weeks out, Drake’s album has racked up nearly 1.4 million equivalent sales, including 1.7 billion streams — a huge showing, but cooler than the release of the rapper’s last studio album, “Scorpion,” in 2018, which in its first six weeks had 1.8 million sales and 1.9 billion streams.Toliver, a protégé of Travis Scott, opened in second place with “Life of a Don,” his second studio album. It had the equivalent of 68,000 sales, including 64 million streams.YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Sincerely, Kentrell” is in third place, Meek Mill’s “Expensive Pain” is No. 4 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5. Last week’s No. 1, Taylor Swift’s “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” fell to No. 35.Attention is now shifting to the data rolling in for next week’s singles chart, with Adele’s song “Easy on Me” expected to arrive with huge numbers. Released late last week — in an unusual move, Adele tied its worldwide arrival to midnight British time, making it available in the United States on Thursday — it quickly attracted big streaming numbers. Spotify announced that the song had broken its record for the most-streamed track in a single day, and Amazon Music said it had gotten “the most first-day Alexa song requests” in that service’s history.On Monday, CBS announced “Adele One Night Only,” a two-hour special featuring a concert performance and an interview with Oprah Winfrey, coming on Nov. 14, five days before the release of “30,” Adele’s first album in six years. More

An ensemble of 18 string players who are Black and Latino set a reflective and spirited tone on Friday, with solos by the charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines.“Tracing Visions” was the intriguing title of the program Sphinx Virtuosi, an ensemble of 18 top-notch string players who are Black and Latino, presented at Carnegie Hall on Friday. As Afa S. Dworkin, the president of Sphinx, explained in comments to the audience, that phrase spoke both to the organization’s mission and the music played so impressively on this night.You have to have a vision, to conceive one carefully, before you can write it out and realize it, Dworkin suggested. Sphinx began in 1997 as a “social justice organization dedicated to transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts,” an ambitious mission statement more essential at this moment than ever. Based in Detroit but with nationwide reach to some 100,000 students and artists, Sphinx puts string instruments in the hands of children and provides them training; sponsors a national competition that awards stipends, scholarships and performance opportunities; and has a development project for emerging artists, among other initiatives.Sphinx Virtuosi, which is in the midst of a national tour, is the most prestigious outlet of the organization; and the splendid performances showed why. A beguiling account of the opening work, Xavier Foley’s “Ev’ry Voice,” set a reflective tone. The music is like an episodic rumination on “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the “Black national anthem.” At first, segments of the melody are played in tentative, harmonically rich strands. Then, while violins ascend to high, softly tender lines, in lower registers other strings begin stirring, as if to get this piece up and running. There are passages of bustling riffs, hard-edge chords, a burst of swing and, finally, a fanfare. This led to Florence Price’s wistfully lyrical Andante cantabile movement from her 1935 String Quartet No. 2, which came across with glowing richness in this version for string ensemble.Various players took turns introducing works. One member explained that the Brazilian violinist and composer Ricardo Herz had adapted “Mourinho,” a bracing dance song in the Brazilian forró style, especially for Sphinx. Since the original was alive with percussion, the string players here slap and tap their instruments to evoke the rhythms that capture the festive vibe of the music, as indeed they did in this arresting performance.The cellist Thomas Mesa performed a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers.Jennifer TaylorThe Cuban American cellist Thomas Mesa spoke at some length before playing Andrea Casarrubios’s “Seven” for solo cello, a searching, intense and elegiac tribute to essential workers during the pandemic. The title alludes to the communal ritual of applauding, shouting and banging pots and pans every night at 7 p.m. for those heroes. Mesa played it magnificently.Jessie Montgomery’s “Banner,” which received its New York premiere by Sphinx Virtuosi at Carnegie in 2014, has become almost her signature piece. The music takes “The Star-Spangled Banner” and explores, fractures, transforms and comments upon the tune and its complex associations. Scored for a solo string quartet both with and against a background string ensemble, the piece received a vibrant, assured performance here.The charismatic bass-baritone Davóne Tines was the soloist in the two next pieces: The British composer Gerald Finzi’s “Come away, come away, death,” a sternly beautiful musical setting of a Shakespeare poem (from the song cycle “Let Us Garlands Bring”); and Carlos Simon’s “Angels in Heaven,” an arrangement of a spiritual sung during baptisms (“I know I’ve been changed”). Tines invited the audience to join in the final refrains of the church song. Many members of this audience clearly knew it well, judging from the vigor of the response.The program ended with the breathless, wild and wailing “Finale furioso” from Alberto Ginastera’s Concerto for Strings. The prolonged ovation that followed was no surprise. More

“Waiata/Anthems,” Lorde’s “Te Ao Marama” EP and a host of other projects are aimed at revitalizing the Indigenous language of New Zealand via music.In August, Lorde released her third album, “Solar Power.” Three weeks later, she put out an EP called “Te Ao Marama,” with five songs from the record translated into Maori, the Indigenous language of New Zealand. The second release was no mere afterthought — it was part of longtime conversations in her native country about boosting a language that not long ago experts feared could die out.“Pakeha artists have been lending their support to the language revitalization movement for years, and as someone with global recognition, I knew at some stage I would do the same,” Lorde wrote in an email, referring to non-Maori New Zealanders. “But ‘Te Ao Marama’ didn’t come from a place of duty. I am richer for having sung in te reo” — which means “the language” in Maori — “and also for having made the connections that made doing so possible.”When the musician and producer Dame Hinewehi Mohi, one of the primary engines behind the musical Maori revival, performed the New Zealand national anthem at the 1999 Rugby World Cup in Maori rather than English, she got “such an adverse reaction from a minority of people,” she recalled in a recent interview. Twenty years later, she assembled “Waiata/Anthems” (waiata means “song”), an album of English tracks performed in Maori that includes a translation of Benee’s “Soaked” and Kings’s “Don’t Worry ’Bout It.”“Before this,” Mohi said, “there were only a handful of artists recording in te reo Maori.”The public’s response to the album astounded her: “Waiata/Anthems” debuted at No. 1 on the New Zealand charts in 2019. The work, and interest in Maori music, has not subsided. This year, the public broadcaster TVNZ released a documentary series that followed different artists translating and recording their songs in Maori for a second installment of the project. More than 30 tracks in Maori were released as a playlist, eight of which made it into the local Top 40, and two in the Top 10.Awareness and celebration of Maori music is mirroring a shift in attitudes toward the language across New Zealand. The country’s European settler government suppressed Maori beginning in the mid-1850s, punishing children who spoke their language at school and deliberately dispersing Maori families in white neighborhoods to assimilate them, creating far-reaching whakama, or shame, around it. By 1987, when Maori was finally declared an official language, the vast majority of its remaining speakers were older.In recent years, there has been a resurgence of supporters, including Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who said in 2018 that her newborn daughter would learn both Maori and English. Newscasters now greet in Maori; weather reporters call places by their original, Maori names; supermarket signs tell you where the “chicken/heihei” is. Kotahi Rau Pukapuka, an endeavor that aims to publish 100 books in Maori over the next 25 years, is already far ahead of schedule. Mohi’s idea to bring attention to the language via contemporary music was pragmatic: More than half of the Maori population, which make up nearly 17 percent of the total population, is under 30 years old.But who sings in Maori, and how, has also become a flash point. Lorde was criticized in the wake of her EP’s release by those who argued that white speakers are privileged to do so without having to address the trauma of the Maori people; or said that the EP is a painful reminder of how many Maori haven’t had access to their own language. Other observers called her project “a pop culture landmark we should welcome” and “a very powerful international statement about the currency of the language.” Mohi had approached Lorde about working on the original “Waiata/Anthems” because “you want the biggest audience” exposed to Maori, she said.Singing has always been a large part of Maori culture: In formal meetings, it is compulsory to sing after your speech (these “songs” are more like chants). Songs are used to pass on information, including “telling the grandchild what deaths he needs to avenge, what things he needs to remember, the important features of tribe history,” said Sir Timoti Karetu, an expert on Maori language and culture.Maori people sing other songs — love songs, naughty songs, insulting songs — in everyday life, too. “We sing no matter where we are,” Karetu said. Music helped keep the language alive even when the government’s restrictions were in place. Maori people adapted with the times, writing new tunes highly influenced by Pakeha melodies. “We’ve borrowed the tune and done our own thing,” Karetu said.“It’s very easy to do a literal translation, but that’s meaningless to both cultures — it’s just words,” said Sir Timoti Karetu, an expert on Maori language and culture.Cameron James McLaren for The New York TimesBic Runga, a Maori singer involved in both “Waiata/Anthems” releases, said, “There’s a really big shift in awareness here.” She was in the process of reconnecting with her roots when Mohi approached her for the first album, which included her song “Sway,” made famous by the movie “American Pie.” Though Runga had only absorbed little bits of Maori in elementary school, as a result of doing “Waiata/Anthems,” she’s been connected to more fluent speakers and is trying to incorporate Maori into her emails, like opening with “tena koe” instead of “hi.”Runga has tried writing a song in Maori, although it’s not as simple as translating the text directly. “It was kind of spooky — it was about talking to death,” she said. When the lyrics were getting checked, she found out she’d been using the literal translation for death instead of the personified word — Maori is a very metaphorical language associated with a worldview that is more connected with nature, and doesn’t necessarily follow Western assumptions.“It’s very easy to do a literal translation, but that’s meaningless to both cultures — it’s just words,” Karetu said.“There’s a really big shift in awareness here,” the musician Bic Runga said.Dave Simpson/WireImage, via Getty ImagesAn example of its nuance can be found in Lorde’s “Hine-i-te-Awatea,” or “Oceanic Feeling.” Hana Mereraiha, who translated it, said she was granted creative license for the three songs she worked on; the album “Solar Power,” with its dedication to the sun and everything living under it, was quite Maori in spirit already.“There’s a really beautiful concept in te ao Maori, that of kaitiakitanga,” Lorde wrote. “It refers to an understanding that people and environment are interconnected and dependent on each other’s care to thrive.”The final line of the third verse of “Hine-i-te-Awatea” refers to the Maori idioms “paki o Hewa” and “paki o Ruhi,” which both mean fine weather, referencing the deities Hewa and Ruhi — “paki o Ruhi” is associated specifically with summer. Its last part, “te ao marama,” is a translation of the equivalent line in the English version, “I can make anything real,” as it refers to when the god Tane separated his father (Rangi-nui, the sky) from his mother (Papatuanuku, the earth), and brought light into the world.Mereraiha “broadened the universe of the song so that all the spiritual presences I could always feel but could never articulate were there,” Lorde wrote. “The Maori version feels like the original to me now.”Hana Mereraiha is a translator who worked on Lorde’s EP project, among others.Cameron James McLaren for The New York TimesSince Mereraiha started translating, she has worked with around 12 artists, and is writing and singing as well. “Dame Hinewehi has opened up many pathways into the music industry,” she said.The Maori singer Marlon Williams, who made a brief appearance in “A Star is Born” in 2018, decided to write his next album completely in Maori. Like Runga, Williams didn’t really speak Maori until a few years ago — he attended a kohanga reo, a total immersion preschool, and took some Maori at high school, but none of it stuck.For Williams, learning the language fresh has helped his songwriting. “I’m not aware of the errors I’m making,” he said, so he’s “not weighed down by them.” He relies on a collaborator, Kommi Tamati-Elliffe, a hip-hop artist and Maori lecturer at the University of Canterbury, to check over his work and find solutions when phrases aren’t working.“We’re on another awkward step on the globalization ladder where everything is mixing and melding,” Williams said. But he believes listeners don’t need to understand the lyrics for the songs to become big hits. “I don’t know any more Spanish after listening to ‘Despacito,’” Williams said. “Things that exist in the pop realm sometimes are their own thing.”Language revitalization is “a never-ending battle,” Karetu said. “All of us who have been colonized by somebody else are struggling for our languages to survive.” But, when it comes to songs, he’s more positive. “Waiata will never die. I think waiata will go on forever and ever.” More

She co-wrote hits for En Vogue, Toni Braxton and other artists in the 1990s and 2000s and was also a singer, releasing an album.Andrea Martin, a songwriter behind a string of R&B hits, including Monica’s “Before You Walk Out of My Life” and Toni Braxton’s “I Love Me Some Him,” died on Sept. 27 in a hospital in New York City. She was 49.Her songwriting partner, Ivan Matias, confirmed her death but said the cause was undetermined.Ms. Martin’s first major songwriting credits, which she shared with Mr. Matias and other co-writers, came in 1995. Along with Carsten Schack and Kenneth Karlin, she wrote “Before You Walk Out of My Life,” which peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and established Ms. Martin as an in-demand writer.Ms. Martin, Mr. Matias and Marqueze Etheridge together wrote En Vogue’s “Don’t Let Go (Love),” which reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart and was nominated for best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocal at the 1996 Grammy Awards.Ms. Martin was also a talented vocalist, initially finding work as a backup singer, and Drew Dixon, a vice president at Arista Records in the 1990s, took notice. She signed Ms. Martin to her label as a solo artist, and Arista released her album “The Best of Me” in 1998. The record was not a commercial success, though one of its tracks, “Let Me Return the Favor,” charted on the Billboard Hot 100 as a single.“Hearing people sing my songs was the greatest feeling ever, but it wasn’t a chance for me to express how I felt,” Ms. Martin said in a 1999 interview with The Daily News of New York about the release of her album. “The songs were about my life, but somebody else was singing it. I just wanted people to know this is me and present an album that represents me.”Ms. Dixon cited racism and colorism in the recording industry as possible reasons that Ms. Martin’s solo career did not take off. Had she been lighter-skinned, Ms. Dixon said, her career might have gained more traction.“Andrea was, without a doubt, one of the best singers I ever encountered in my career, and I’m including Whitney, Aretha, Lauryn and Deborah Cox when I say that,” Ms. Dixon said.Andrea Martin was born April 14, 1972, in Brooklyn to Reginald Martin Sr. and Mavis Martin. Her family lived in the East New York neighborhood.She told The Daily News that her biggest inspiration as a child was Michael Jackson. “I’d try to imitate him all day,” she said.She attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan, graduating in 1990, and jumped right into writing songs and performing locally — even resorting to singing in the lobbies of buildings housing music publishing companies to attract the attention of executives. Her big break came when Rondor Music, a major publisher, signed her to a contract in the early 1990s.She is survived by two children, Eresha and Amaya; her parents; her sisters, Audrey and Wendy Martin; and her brothers, Reginald Jr., Michael and Shane.Ms. Martin continued to work steadily through the 2000s, writing for Leona Lewis, Melanie Fiona and Sean Kingston and appearing as a featured artist and backup singer for other acts. Mr. Matias said he expected to see unreleased projects featuring Ms. Martin emerge in the coming years.“She had a very specific sound to her writing,” Mr. Matias said. “And it didn’t matter who she worked with. She was infused into the melody.” More

Francesca Zambello, who has overseen a dozen editions of the opera festival in upstate New York, will depart next summer.Next summer, the Glimmerglass Festival of opera and music theater in Cooperstown, N.Y., will return indoors in full force for the farewell season of its artistic and general director, Francesca Zambello, the festival announced on Friday.Zambello, 65, who is also the artistic director of Washington National Opera and an independent stage director, will have led Glimmerglass for 12 seasons when she leaves. In an interview, she said it was the right moment “for a page turn,” and that since she has been with the Washington company for less time, “I decided to extend my contract and devote myself there.”“Part of my heart is super sad, but I also think I don’t want to repeat myself,” she added. “I don’t want to be one of those people. I just want new challenges.”Among the hallmarks of her tenure at Glimmerglass have been the addition of original youth operas each season; an initiative at Attica Correctional Facility; a broadened repertoire that includes Broadway musicals, concert programming and new works; and the introduction of high-profile artists in residence such as Christine Goerke, Eric Owens and, for the 2022 season, Denyce Graves.Graves is scheduled to direct a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen” during next summer’s festival, which will run from July 8 through Aug. 21. It will be something of a homecoming for this mezzo-soprano: Carmen was one of her signature roles. Graves is also set to reprise her performance from this past summer’s outdoor premiere of “The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson,” Sandra Seaton’s play about the founder of the National Negro Opera Company, with music by Carlos Simon.The 2022 program also includes a new production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music,” originally scheduled for 2020 but postponed because of the pandemic; the premiere of “Tenor Overboard,” a Rossini pastiche with a book by Ken Ludwig, the Tony Award-winning playwright of “Lend Me a Tenor” and “Crazy For You”; and a double bill of Kamala Sankaram and Jerre Dye’s “Taking Up Serpents” and the premiere of Damien Geter’s “Holy Ground,” with a libretto by Lila Palmer. (Sankaram, the festival’s composer in residence next summer, also wrote the season’s youth opera, “The Jungle Book.”) More

Students objected after the composer Bright Sheng showed the 1965 film of Laurence Olivier’s “Othello” to his class at the University of Michigan.It was supposed to be an opportunity for music students at the University of Michigan to learn about the process of adapting a classic literary text into an opera from one of the music school’s most celebrated professors, the composer Bright Sheng.But at the first class meeting of this fall’s undergraduate composition seminar, when Professor Sheng hit play on the 1965 film of Shakespeare’s “Othello” starring Laurence Olivier, it quickly became a lesson in something else entirely.Students said they sat in stunned silence as Olivier appeared onscreen in thickly painted blackface makeup. Even before class ended 90 minutes later, group chat messages were flying, along with at least one email of complaint to the department reporting that many students were “incredibly offended both by this video and by the lack of explanation as to why this was selected for our class.”Within hours, Professor Sheng had sent a terse email issuing the first of what would be two apologies. Then, after weeks of emails, open letters and canceled classes, it was announced on Oct. 1 that Professor Sheng — a two-time Pulitzer finalist and winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant — was voluntarily stepping back from the class entirely, in order to allow for a “positive learning environment.”The incident might have remained just the latest flash point at a music program that has been roiled in recent years by a series of charges of misconduct by star professors. But a day before Professor Sheng stepped down, a long, scathing Medium post by a student in the class rippled across Twitter before getting picked up in Newsweek, Fox News, The Daily Mail and beyond, entangling one of the nation’s leading music schools in the supercharged national debate over race, academic freedom and free speech.To some observers, it’s a case of campus “cancel culture” run amok, with overzealous students refusing to accept an apology — with the added twist that the Chinese-born Professor Sheng was a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, during which the Red Guards had seized the family piano.To others, the incident is symbolic of an arrogant academic and artistic old guard and of the deeply embedded anti-Black racism in classical music, a field that has been slow to abandon performance traditions featuring blackface and other racialized makeup.The Olivier “Othello,” from 1965, was controversial even when it was new; the critic Bosley Crowther expressed shock in The New York Times that the actor “plays Othello in blackface.” Warner BrothersIn an email to The New York Times, Professor Sheng, 66, reiterated his apology. “From the bottom of my heart, I would like to say that I am terribly sorry,” he said.“Of course, facing criticism for my misjudgment as a professor here is nothing like the experience that many Chinese professors faced during the Cultural Revolution,” he wrote. “But it feels uncomfortable that we live in an era where people can attempt to destroy the career and reputation of others with public denunciation. I am not too old to learn, and this mistake has taught me much.”Professor Sheng, who joined the Michigan faculty in 1995 and holds the title Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor, the highest rank on the faculty, was born in 1955 in Shanghai. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, to avoid being sent to a farm to be “re-educated,” he auditioned for an officially sanctioned folk music ensemble, and was sent to Qinghai province, a remote area near the Tibetan border, according to a university biography.After the universities reopened in 1976, he got a degree in composition from Shanghai University, and in 1982, he moved to the United States, eventually earning a doctorate at Columbia University.His work, which includes an acclaimed 2016 opera based on the 18th-century Chinese literary classic “Dream of the Red Chamber,” blends elements of Eastern and Western music. “When someone asks me if I consider myself a Chinese or American composer, I say, in the most humble way, ‘100 percent both,’” he said earlier this year.The Olivier film was controversial even when it was new. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Bosley Crowther expressed shock that Olivier “plays Othello in blackface,” noting his “wig of kinky black hair,” his lips “smeared and thickened with a startling raspberry red” and his exaggerated accent, which he described as reminiscent of “Amos ‘n’ Andy.” (To “the sensitive American viewer,” Crowther wrote, Olivier looked like someone in a “minstrel show.”)Professor Sheng, in his emailed response to questions from The Times, said that the purpose of the class had been to show how Verdi had adapted Shakespeare’s play into an opera, and that he had chosen the Olivier film simply because it was “one of the most faithful to Shakespeare.” He also said that he had not seen the makeup as an attempt to mock Black people, but as part of a long tradition — one that has persisted in opera — which he said valued the “music quality of the singers” over physical resemblance.“Of course, times have changed, and I made a mistake in showing this film,” he said. “That was insensitive of me, and I am very sorry.”But to the students — for some, it was their very first class at the university — it was simply a shock. “I was stunned,” Olivia Cook, a freshman, told The Michigan Daily, adding that the classroom was “supposed to be a safe space.”Bright Sheng’s work includes an acclaimed 2016 opera based on the 18th-century Chinese literary classic “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which was performed at the San Francisco Opera in 2016.Jason Henry for The New York TimesA week after the video was shown, Professor Sheng signed on to a letter from six of the composition department’s seven professors, which described the incident as “disappointing and harmful to individual students in many different ways, and destructive to our community.” He also sent another, longer, apology, saying that since the incident, “I did more research and learning on the issue and realized that the depth of racism was, and still is, a dangerous part of American culture.”Professor Sheng also cited discrimination he had faced as an Asian American and listed various Black musicians he had mentored or supported, as well as his daughter’s experience performing with Kanye West. “I hope you can accept my apology and see that I do not discriminate,” he wrote.That apology provoked fresh outrage. In an open letter to the dean, a group of 33 undergraduate and graduate students and nine staff and faculty members (whose names were not made public) called on the school to remove Professor Sheng from the class, calling his apology “inflammatory” and referring to an unspecified “pattern of harmful behavior in the classroom” which had left students feeling “unsafe and uncomfortable.”(“In retrospect,” Professor Sheng wrote in his email to The Times, “I should have apologized for my mistake without qualification.”).css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}On Sept. 30, a senior in the class, Sammy Sussman, posted the long Medium essay, outlining what he saw as Professor Sheng’s “disregard for students” (which, he wrote, included walking out in the middle of Mr. Sussman’s audition for the program several years earlier). Mr. Sussman, who in 2018 was the first to report allegations of sexual misconduct against another music faculty member, Stephen Shipps, also linked the case to what he said was a broader failure of the university and the classical music industry to hold prominent figures to account.After Mr. Sussman posted a link to the essay on Twitter, it was retweeted by another composition professor, Kristin Kuster, who cited the need for “conversations about pedagogical racism and pedagogical abuse,” and tagged a number of musicians, as well as the Pulitzer Prize board and the MacArthur Foundation. (Both Mr. Sussman and Professor Kuster declined to comment on the record.)Some accused the students, and the school, of overreacting. In an article in Reason, Robby Soave, an editor at the magazine, argued that Professor Sheng’s apology “ought to have been more than sufficient” and argued that he now deserves an apology himself.“The University of Michigan is a public institution at which students and professors deserve free speech and expression rights,” he wrote. “It is a violation of the university’s cherished principles of academic freedom to punish Sheng for the choices he makes in the classroom. Screening a racially problematic film in an educational setting is neither a racist act nor an endorsement of racism.”A spokesman for the university, Kim Broekhuizen, confirmed that the incident had been referred to the university’s Office of Equity, Civil Rights and Title IX for investigation, but emphasized that Professor Sheng had stepped down from the class voluntarily, was still teaching individual studios, and was scheduled to teach next semester.“We do not shy away from addressing racism or any other difficult topic with our students,” Ms. Broekhuizen said in an email to The Times. But “in this particular instance, the appropriate context or historical perspective was not provided and the professor has acknowledged that.”Some scholars who teach blackface traditions questioned the quickness of some to denounce the students, or to mock their insistence on contextualization as a demand for “trigger warnings.”“Gen Z is unbelievably right on when they say, ‘If you’re not going to give us the context, we shouldn’t have to watch it,’” said Ayanna Thompson, a Shakespeare scholar at Arizona State University who has written extensively on Shakespeare and race.Professor Thompson, the author of the recent book “Blackface” and a trustee of the Royal Shakespeare Company, declined to comment on the details of Professor Sheng’s case. But she said that when it comes to “Othello” and blackface minstrelsy, the connections aren’t incidental, but absolutely fundamental.Contrary to widespread belief, she said, blackface wasn’t an American invention, but sprang from older European performance traditions going back to the Middle Ages. And it was at an 1833 performance of “Othello” featuring a blacked-up actor that T.D. Rice, the white American performer seen as the father of minstrelsy, claimed to have been inspired to get up at intermission and put on blackface to perform “Jump Jim Crow” for the first time.“Whenever you’re teaching Shakespeare, period, the history of performing race should be part of the discussion,” Professor Thompson said. “Everyone has a responsibility to give the full history.” More

He’s won eight Grammys alongside his sister, Billie Eilish, and worked with some of the genre’s biggest stars. Now the 24-year-old musician is arriving as a solo artist with “Optimist.”LOS ANGELES — There’s a ghoul hanging around Finneas’s house. A dark shadow spinning past the window of his otherwise sunny and calm music studio. “The way it moves, it catches your eye at the wrong time,” he said. It spooks him.You could be forgiven for thinking that Finneas, 24, the multi-instrumentalist who’s earned a global following — and eight Grammys — as the producer and songwriting collaborator of his teen-phenom sister Billie Eilish, is a little goth. As siblings, their work is often not just brooding but haunted, even deviant. Finneas’s debut studio album as a solo artist, released on Friday and entitled “Optimist” (“it’s aspirational,” he told me) features a track called “The Kids Are All Dying,” followed shortly by “Love Is Pain.” With his vocals at a ballad pitch, it is suffused with generational and personal anxiety, along with the gloss of romance.So it was with the ghoul — Halloween décor, put up by Finneas’s girlfriend, the social media personality Claudia Sulewski, while he was out of town. (He was mystified that it didn’t creep her out.) Finneas isn’t a prince of darkness, but he is forthcoming about his fears. Emotionally unfiltered, confessional: “It’s kind of how I am, on and off the microphone,” he said.The studio is where he works out those feelings. Except for the first track’s subtle violin and cello, he wrote, performed, arranged and produced “Optimist” entirely on his own, playing all the instruments (bass, guitar, piano, synths, and doing the drum programming and sound effects). “It was like, why you would build your own house if you were a carpenter,” he said, sitting barefoot and cross-legged on a rolling chair in his studio here recently, in ripped jeans and bed head. “Why would I hire someone else to do something I know how to do and can execute myself? And it’s also really fun.”Since he and Eilish broke through with her album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” in 2019, Finneas has been increasingly in-demand as a producer. One of those Grammys was for producer of the year, nonclassical; at 22 he was the youngest person ever to win in that category. He has recorded with Selena Gomez, Camila Cabello and a handful of other artists, many of them young women.Billie Eilish and Finneas took home armloads of Grammys for her 2019 album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”Amanda Edwards/Getty ImagesCabello said she wrote “Used to This,” widely understood to be about the beginnings of her relationship with the musician Shawn Mendes, in two days with Finneas. “It felt like just downloading with a friend,” she said in an email. “He is so detail-oriented in his own music, and his lyrics are so about the small little things, like my favorite poetry, that he really influenced where the writing went.”After the session, Finneas “wrote me a long text explaining his production choices,” she said. He added atmospheric touches like the whoosh of a trolley before the song mentions San Francisco, “tequila glasses clinking, the guitar solo when I say the ‘calluses on your fingers’ line,” Cabello wrote. “He really is like a painter or a poet, and he captures these huge feelings by focusing in on the little details.”Tove Lo, the Swedish singer-songwriter, worked on two tracks with Finneas in 2019. One was the hedonist pop ditty “Bikini Porn,” another an introspective, off-kilter ode. “I find him really good at finding the ‘nerve’” of a song, she wrote in an email. He’s “not so focused on the format, but what feeling you want to feel next in the song. He’s also not afraid to go somewhere unexpected without losing the sentiment of it all.”She added that Finneas’s work with his sister gave her confidence that her own perspective would be heard in the studio. “It was such a chill energy, and I felt very comfortable throwing out any idea that popped into my head without thinking it over too much first,” she said.Like his sister, Finneas — born Finneas Baird O’Connell — began playing music as a kid, encouraged by his parents, Maggie Baird and Patrick O’Connell, workaday actors who home-schooled their children, prioritizing a creative family life. “For my third birthday, I asked for a hi-hat cymbal and a conductor’s baton,” Finneas said. His parents delivered. “And we were in the middle floor of a triplex.” (Sorry, neighbors.)“It’s just me on this album,” Finneas said. “There’s no one else sharing the oxygen.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHe fell in love with songwriting when he was about 12, and his mom, a singer and guitarist herself, offered a kind of songwriting boot camp. As an exercise, she had the kids write from a different person’s perspective — a TV character, say. “I definitely think that sculpted us both, and especially him,” Eilish said in a phone interview. “Songwriting is about truth and honesty, but it’s also storytelling.”As a teenager, Finneas taught himself production. Now, there’s an infrastructure to learn studio skills from home, and 5-year-olds are making beats on TikTok. But back then, in the woolly days of 2014, Finneas said, his biggest resource was “guys on YouTube who run worship bands in church.”Though he described himself as “areligious,” at 16 and 17, he was staying up all night in his bedroom at his parents’ house in Los Angeles, learning how to record a bass line or comp a vocal in Logic, the audio software, from Christian rockers. His first band, the Slightlys, played a couple of local shows with the Warped Tour; he and his sister had also spent years singing in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus — “harmony school,” Finneas called it. That was the extent of his formal musical training. By 2016, he and Eilish had their first viral hit, “Ocean Eyes.”They have what he called a “creatively monogamous relationship.” He also co-wrote and produced her sophomore album, released this summer, and tours with her. She says he is her best friend.Road tripping home from an event in Temecula, Calif., this spring in the family minivan, the whole clan heard “Optimist” for the first time. “We stopped and got burgers” — vegan burgers — “and he played us his album,” Eilish said. “We listened to it twice, and it was very touching — I love it. Finneas is the most talented person I know.”“It’s funny to me that he made an album with only a few songs,” she added (there are 13 songs!) “because the dude writes so much. And everything he writes, it’s so good, it’s, like, really upsetting to me. Because I am not a fast writer and I am not an easy writer. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, and he makes it look so, so easy. It’s infuriating.”Finneas, Peaches and Eilish’s preferred microphone.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAn old mic that Eilish records with stands at attention in Finneas’ home studio; some smiley Murakami pillows followed him from his childhood bedroom, where he and Eilish made their breakthrough album. The studio is not otherwise very ornamented — a pile of platinum album plaques loll, unhung, in the bathroom. A fountain in the courtyard outside burbles audibly; Finneas purposefully didn’t seal off the studio from outside sound (the burbling is there, very faintly, on many of his songs, he said). He recorded about half of “Optimist” at home, before a burst pipe flooded the space and forced him into a rental studio. No biggie: his Gen Z-laptop-producer ethos is that “you can make stuff anywhere.”Outside of touring, he’s fairly domestic: Sulewski, his girlfriend of three years, YouTubes their seemingly wholesome relationship (they once spent two hours making a gingerbread house).“I definitely don’t think your best work requires tension or struggle,” he said. “I’ve made heartbreaking songs that I love as a very happy person.”His dotes on his pit bull, Peaches, for whom he named a non-lyrical, piano-only étude on his album — the sort of track that might get cut if there was another artist to answer to. “When I’m producing for other people, including Billie, no matter how much say I have, I care the most that it’s theirs, and they feel ownership, and they love it, you know?” he said. “And so, it’s really fulfilling to make something exactly how I want it to be and then put it out and live with it. It’s just me on this album. There’s no one else sharing the oxygen.” More